big quality loose when converting from divx to vcd

[boazg]

i cant seem to solve this problem. i am tying to convert a 23.976 fps divx movie to a vcd , with the step by step instructions from this site , and every time i loose big time quality which makes it shitty for viewing in tv. i want to convert the movie so i will be able to see it with my standalone dvd player. i also tried to converts the file to svcd and the created mpeg was not readable by the windows media player and not by my dvd player: disc error.
can someone tell how to convert good , with not much of quality loose.... i wanna see these movies on tv and no on the computer screen................ thanx

[ronnylov]

It is not good to reencode twice. DivX is normally a reencoded DVD and then you reencode it again to VCD. VCD is bad quality to start with and if you feed it with a DivX source you will loose much quality.

I suggest using the TV-out of your graphics card and connect it to your TV and the audio from your soundcard to your TV. Then you can get good quality if you have a good DivX file.

But if you still must convert the DivX to VCD I suggest some filtering to get rid of the compression artifacts and then encode to VCD in TMPGEnc. You will still probably get bad quality but you can try it and see if works.

[boazg]

good idea....... im thinking of reencode it to the the original form before the divx and from that to vcd......

[ronnylov]

If you reencode it one more time then you loose even more quality. Once you have lost the quality you can't get it back. It's like copy a music CD to mp3 and then thinking that you will gain quality if you copy the mp3 back to a music CD... Or if you take a nice photography and put it into a Xerox copier and then take a camera and take a photography of the copy. This picture won't look any better than the copy.

The best thing is to get the original film and scan each frame as a picture and then make a VCD directly from it. The next best thing is to get the original DVD and encode directly to VCD. A worse thing to do is to encode a DVD to DivX to VCD. And even worse is to encode a DivX to DVD and then to VCD.

So if you only got the DivX and no original source then you can't convert the DivX to anything better than it was to start with. It can only be worse. That's why I suggest not to convert the DivX. Just play it as it is. If you still want a VCD copy then avoid any intermediate reencoding steps. By the way a good VCD is worse quality than a good DivX even if the source was perfect so it's normal that you loose quality when converting to VCD.

Perhaps your computer doesn't have TV-out? Perhaps your CPU is not fast enough to play the DivX? Perhaps you need a copy to a friend that does not have a computer? Then I understand why you may want to convert it.

[Nocturno]

Encode it to SVCD with a high bitrate, and you have almost no quality loss in my experience!